'Online Poker' Googlebomb 379
Philipp Lenssen writes "The blogger community is fighting back, though in ways not everyone may like: they are Googlebombing the Wikipedia page on online poker for the phrase "online poker" to make it rank higher in search engines. "Online poker", along with "Viagra", "mortgage" and "debt", are keywords heavily represented in comment spam, which itself aims to boost the Google ranking for a particular site and phrase. The Wikipedia page is currently third in Google."
You submitted this... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You submitted this... (Score:2, Funny)
i thought pagerank was just for relevant sites.
Re:You submitted this... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You submitted this... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You submitted this... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You submitted this... (Score:5, Funny)
I couldn't in all fairness let you get away with that without the opportunity to help out my fellow brothers by slashdotting these guys [gamblersanonymous.org].
Re:You submitted this... (Score:2)
Offtopic?
Well, this is
CC.
Re:You submitted this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's one to start: Online poker [gamblersanonymous.org]
Re:You submitted this... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You submitted this... (Score:3, Interesting)
I would think bloggers would like google:p
Re:You submitted this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I am sure the bloggers love google and hate seeing spam have large amounts of influence on the results.
Re:You submitted this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You submitted this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Google [ play online poker ] (Score:5, Interesting)
If someone searches for online poker; they probably want to play online poker
If somebody wants to play online poker [google.com], Google won't return any Wikipedia pages in the top 10.
which is what the wiki page is displacing.
Not at all. Online poker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [wikipedia.org] links to seven poker sites.
Re:Google [ play online poker ] (Score:3, Insightful)
Just clickthrough for wikipedia and its favored poker sites?
Re:Google [ play online poker ] (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Google [ play online poker ] (Score:5, Interesting)
My blog is probably the least trafficed site on the internet. Google doesn't even index the blog's sub pages as they're php and not directory roots. I basicly do news commentary. That's it.
I get between three and five entries comments every day from online poker spamers. They do their comments in HTML, and add H1 tags to the entire thing. Each comment consists of about 50 links ranging from online poker to places to buy viagra.
I write this as a hobby. I pay for it out of pocket, it makes no revenue and, as I don't sell ad space or use ad words, I never expect it to.
If I'm not going to use the resources I paied for to advertise why should someone else get to? This kind of behavior is inconsiderate, it's invasive, and it's really fucking annoying.
So yea.... I'm tired of being used as free advertising for something I'll never see a dime from.
Re:Google [ play online poker ] (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Google [ play online poker ] (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Google [ play online poker ] (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, it's still obnoxious. I'd like to encourage comments and see more of them. I'd also like to spend more time writing for my blog and less time writing filters for my comments page.
I feel like having to slap those security measures in place makes people less likely to comment and takes away from time that I could be using to add more content to
Re:Google [ play online poker ] (Score:4, Insightful)
It's NOT because nobody wants to play.
Re:Google [ play online poker ] (Score:3, Informative)
Wow! time to change my slashdot sig!
I know, I'll buy Goat.cx and redirect it to a poker site.
Re:Google [ play online poker ] (Score:3, Interesting)
People do want to play it, or it wouldn't be profitable. Internet gambling is believed to be second only to sex in terms of profitability.
Re:Google [ play online poker ] (Score:3, Interesting)
Bloggers - Be articulate. (Score:5, Informative)
And you who are about to say that it already says that -- it does ONLY if you approach the paragraph with that knowledge. For someone outside the blogging community - it's just confusing. Last, if you still like it as is, fine, that's why I don't read blogs. Too often they are crypitc and snooty.
Grrrrrr. How's that for bitterness!
Re:Bloggers - Be articulate. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wrong. That isn't my attitude. My point was that the article summary was vague, incomplete, and poorly written. Rather than explaining any of the "why are they googlebombing", it basically only states that they are googlebombing. Granted, once you understand the background, the foreground makes sense, but as a summary directed at users who m
blogger revenge (Score:4, Funny)
Re:blogger revenge (Score:2)
Re:We'll see who gets the last laugh (Score:5, Interesting)
Bloggers link to each other so they can find each other, not so they have pagerank coming out of their ass.
Spammers, however, discovered this pagerank, and started abusing it. Google 'solved' this problem by giving bloggers the ability to add a note to a link saying 'Don't give this any pagerank'.
However, spammers, being about as smart as pond scum's waste products, continue to spam blogs, even the ones that had such attributes added automatically. (These are the same people who attempt to deliver mail to hundreds of addresses on my server that do not and never have existed.) Spammers apparently cannot tell blogs apart.
And hence, to force the issue, blogs have started abusing the power themselves. Google now must write something to tell blogs apart from normal websites, or its entire database will be under the control of bloggers, mwhahahahaha.
The hope is that if google fixes this, within two or three years spammers who have been spamming blogs will have drowned by staring up when it's raining or deciding to go outside for a smoke break while on an airplane, and the new crop won't ever have spammed any blogs. (Spammers cannot learn to stop doing things, only to do new things.)
Of course, bloggers may be overestimating the intelligence of spammers by assuming they know how to operate airplane doors or tilt their head back.
Re:We'll see who gets the last laugh (Score:4, Interesting)
(1) You send the blog server a request for the web site containing the form. (2) The server generates a captcha with an associated hash and sends it to you along with the form. (3) You send a request with the decoded captcha, the hash and the form data attached.
Now the process you described would take captcha + hash you receive in 2, and get the decoded image from wherever. Later on, he goes on with 3, using the decoded text. Now my first idea would limit the time that could pass between 2 and 3, and I think that's a viable suggestion - at worst, an innocent poster will surpass the limit because he takes too long to create a post, but that's not a problem, we'll just send him a new captcha which he can decode within seconds.
But in any event, when you try to do 3 (ie post your spam) a normal human will have to do 2 (ie get the form) before that, so the server would know which captcha he sent you last, and sending the hash and decoded text for any other captcha wouldn't work. A script doesn't have to do 2 before doing 3, because a script doesn't manually fill out a form, but that alone is an odd behavious a server could be programmed to pick up. Sending any other decoded captcha than the one received in 2 is ineffective, if step 2 is skipped, then there is no legal captcha and no post. This would prevent "farming" blogs for captchas to be decoded and used at a later stage.
Sorry if I'm not overly clear (to say the least), I hope at least the time limit argument is simple enough to be understood.
I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
It don' make no sense!
I'm feeling lucky (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm feeling lucky (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm feeling lucky (Score:2)
Re:I'm feeling lucky (Score:5, Interesting)
I no that I rarely ever use it, and when I do, it's typically for something that I already know it will take me to, or for flaming.
One example is the download page for PuTTY. I know the first link for "download putty" in Google is always the page I want, even though I can never remember the URL for that page. It's a convienent way for me to get what I need quickly.
The second way is much more fun. When n00bs on IRC, usenet, or mailing lists ask questions that quite easily could have been answered with a google search, I typically do a quick search and see what's in the first few links. If the very first link comes up with the information, I'll flame 'em and tell them to drop "blah blah 123" into google and tell it you're feeling lucky, and not to come back again until they learn to do this always.
That's it?! (Score:3, Insightful)
I gotta agree with the article... buy more text ads...
Re:That's it?! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I suppose the button "I'm feeling lucky!" makes a lot more sense in the context of online poker.
In all seriousness, some people I know have started using google IFL links on blogs rather tahn direct links. The idea is that in five years if the Captain Crunch brand changes, an I'm Feeling Lucky search for Captain Crunch will probably take you to the new page.
Re:I'm feeling lucky (Score:5, Funny)
Auto (Score:2, Funny)
a picture of some guy trying to suck his own cock (which is what is on the wikipedia site
What's wrong with Wikipedia having an article on autofellatio [wikipedia.org]?
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
Morality of gambling. (Score:2)
If you want to learn about Online Poker [wikipedia.org], it is far better to learn from a reputable source. Almost everyone else out there is going to try and fleece you for a buck. Which of the other top links is not trying to get you to part with your greenbacks?
In a deeper spiritual sense, learning gambling is like learning life itself. The Wikipedia is capable of teaching people to see the forest and the trees, so to speak. Disinterested, independant, impartial--the Wikipedia is an ideal teacher of contentious issue
Wikipedia not good for contentious issues (Score:2)
Wikipedia is the ideal teacher of NON-contentious issues. When it comes to contentious, especially politicial issues, it is no more an ideal "teacher" then a Usenet political forum: fierce partisan editors engage in change-wars in Google entries of controversial subjects. The Bush and Kerry entries in the last election were a great example of this.
Re:I don't understand (Score:2)
Re:I don't understand (Score:3, Informative)
Funny you should ask. From Jakob Nielsen's [useit.com] Alertbox [useit.com] posted today [useit.com]:
Do the ends justify the means? (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, maybe this is an appropriate response -- fighting fire with fire.
Only time will tell if the cure is worse than the disease... but at the moment, I think it's kind of cool to use the spammers' own tactics against them.
Re:Do the ends justify the means? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Do the ends justify the means? (Score:2)
Free advertising (Score:2, Interesting)
Stupid.
Re:Do the ends justify the means? (Score:3, Funny)
It was Jesus. Jesus said "let he who is without sin throw the first stone." Everyone in the circle looked down, and the man on the stake looked hopeful . Slowly but surely, all eyes fixed on Jesus, who realized that
Like Wikipedia Can Spare the Bandwidth (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Like Wikipedia Can Spare the Bandwidth (Score:2)
Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
Period outside quotation marks (Score:3, Informative)
Not necessarily. Putting the period inside the double quotes is accepted American (and I think Canadian) usage.
British people, and most other English speakers elsewhere in the world, put the full stop outside the quotes.
-ccm
Uh, why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The stupid online poker comment spam *is* annoying, yes, but is Googlebombing Wikipedia really a viable solution?
The Wiki didn't come up 3rd when I looked a few minutes ago (it was 5th) and doesn't Google specifically say "Don't do stuff like this!" in their help documentation?
I hope this doesn't backfire.
Re:Uh, why? (Score:2, Interesting)
two wrongs makes a right? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Blog spammers will fight back at blogs - mostly innocient people who have nothing to do with this war.
2. Blog spam can get wikipedia in trouble by violating Google's guildelines [google.com].
3. The recent nofollow [google.com] tag attribue will dimish the value of blog spam.
Re:two wrongs makes a right? (Score:2)
4. This will encourage opportunists to use blog spamming as an effective way to optimize for search engines.
However anyone that has been paying attention to blog spam knows the nigritude ultramarine [slashdot.org] contest already exposed this hole to the masses long ago.
Re:W3C non-compliant (Score:3, Informative)
RYOFA (Read your own fricking article)
6th position here (Score:2)
I am all of these online casino bastards to die... (Score:5, Insightful)
So the online casinos would be forced to stop auto spamming people.
Of course this trouble will never end if these companies have like little gnomes manually spamming blog/blog rings.
solution for Wordpress (Score:2)
Once I installed this [estherfuldauer.com], I haven't received anymore poker spam.(you have to scroll down to the Trencaspammers plugin info). It uses a graphical code the commenter has to type in.
Re:solution for Wordpress (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently spammers were putting up free porn sites, but to get the free porn you had to enter the answers to captcha prompts that were scraped from other sites. People love their porn, so this gave them thousands of valid captcha responses.
People in these industries are evil, yet seemingly very creative.
Result is instant (Score:3, Interesting)
Then a person comes along for the free porn. The moment they hit the page, the spammers site goes off to yours, gets the Captcha, and the users decodes for porn. Instantly the spammer posts whatever on your site.
So basically you cannot win this way, as you can never make the delay for accepting the captcha result any shorter than what a valid reader will need to enter - and there is literally no delay between the porn proxy and the valid rea
Googlebombing is part of Google's design flaw. (Score:2, Interesting)
A good example is a search on "to be or not to be". Even in quotes, 2 or so of the top 10 results are dross: they do not even contain the phrase. Google has some great things, like so many more results and caching, but it is annoying to have bogus results come up like this. If they, by default, actually returned only the pages that co
Re:Googlebombing is part of Google's design flaw. (Score:4, Insightful)
Where is the -1 Patently False moderation tag when you need it?
The reason http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=to+be+or+not
So all that google sees is "not"
Re:Googlebombing is part of Google's design flaw. (Score:3, Insightful)
"to be +or not to be" (quotes and all) give you nothing but appropriate answers on the fist page.
Did you even try what you typed? (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you even try it? I did. The plus makes no difference. Results 8 and 9 do not contain what I was looking for. Besides, having to put + in front of words INSIDE a quote sure is a hassle: is it so hard for a search engine to find the phrase without having to learn complicated rules? Apparently, it is not hard. Long forgottten www.lycos.com produces 100% relevancy in the first 10 results (as opposed to an 80%
Affiliate schemes (Score:5, Interesting)
As you can see they can be quite lucrative. Spammers also post poker site's software to Usenet and p2p networks together with a bonus code that benefits their account, with some steady play these bonuses can be cleared in no time leaving themselves a tidy profit.
Are Google et. al. screwed? (Score:2, Insightful)
The only problem is, the automated robots that Google et. al. use are based on rules, and those rules will ALWAYS be able to be reverse-engineered by spammers.
Is there any way out of this?
(And please don't just say, "Google can just hire a bunch of people to look at stuff" because that won't scale to billions of Internet pages).
Ideas anybody?
Re:Are Google et. al. screwed? (Score:2)
And without the massive casualties, radiation burns, vomiting, hair loss, and slow, painful death from cancer or immune system failure.
Re:Are Google et. al. screwed? (Score:3, Insightful)
How would you reverse-engineer it?
Re:Are Google et. al. screwed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Willy on Wheels! (Score:2, Interesting)
Unprotected (Score:4, Informative)
And the Wikipedia page is not protected [wikipedia.org] right now which means that the spammers or trollers can add their links directly to that page by clicking edit this page [wikipedia.org] link and their changes will be visible immediately. Wikipedia administrators can protect that page by clicking this link [wikipedia.org] and adding {{vprotected}} at the top of the article to protect it from vandalism [wikipedia.org].
So? (Score:2, Insightful)
If I were to search for "online poker" I'd be sure to read the TITLE and the two lines or so that Google gives you from the site to figure out if it was a relevant result or not.
If I already know what online poker is, there's no need for me to go to a wikipedia page, no matter how high it's listed. Conversely, if I'm not interested in playing, I'm not going to go to some site unless I haven't had my daily dose of cookies.
Very few people use the "I'm fee
Wikipedia first for "online poker" (Score:2)
Should have picked a site that fights addiction (Score:2, Insightful)
WTF (Score:2, Funny)
Indeed What the Fuck? (Score:2)
Re:WTF (Score:2, Funny)
Re:WTF (Score:2)
Well anyway... you learn something new every day it seems.
Some clever bastard.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Bloggers are hilariously stupid. (Score:3)
Well, no surprises here: it turns out that the vapid tools who maintain "blogs" really are as stupid as they seem.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
WARNING (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WARNING (Score:2)
Revision as of 01:11, 15 Mar 2005
Line 1:- #REDIRECT[[de:en:Image:Autofellatio.jpg]]
Better way to fight it (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia link not safe for work? (Score:3, Informative)
The current link to Online Poker in Wikipedia is redirecting me to something I'd rather never have seen.
Here's the Google Cache [64.233.167.104] of the actual Wikipedia article (until somebody over there figures out why I was sent to an auto-fellatio site)
highly unethical (Score:2, Redundant)
Greedy abuse of Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
Again I say "sad". I vote to delete--except that that's pointless, too. The people who want to sucker other people via online gambling are of course much more strongly motivated than people like I am. I'm just annoyed. They're dreaming of striking it rich, if only they can find enough suckers fast enough.
Anyway, the Wikipedia deletion process was too difficult to figure out.
Give me a break.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't worry this will sort them out (Score:4, Interesting)
Need to fill more than one slot! (Score:5, Insightful)
brain dead morons (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem:- the bloggers leave pages open to the public, that anybody can modify, and they get spammed by the poker places.
Solution:- Spam google, so that the highest ranked page on the net for 'online poker' is, you guessed it, a user modifiable page, hosted somewhere else. They have made the wikipedia page the most valuable real-estate on the net regarding the given search term, so, now it's wikipdeia's problem, that page is going to be target of constant spam/attack/redirect attempts.
I would have thought the blog types would understand, and target a static page, where this is not a problem. No, they gotta take the problem from thier insignificant little nothing sites, and turn it into a major problem for one of the most significant sites on the internet. Way to go assholes, what a wonderful way to cause a huge amount of problems for a very valuable net resource, that's done nothing to cause problems for your precious 'blog community'.
There is a reason that most folks find the rantings in blogspace a total waste of otherwise useful bandwidth, this is yet another good example. Only the selfish shortsighted stupidity of the blog community would come up with the idea of solving thier problem, by making a wikipedia problem instead.
That's about as smart as an anvil folks, and it's this kind of stupidity that causes most of the world to view blogspace as wasted space. Whoever came up with the idea of google-bombing the term 'online poker' with a wikipedia page, should be taken out back and strung up. Didn't a single one of the bloggers in question have enough intelligence to figure out how big of a problem this is going to create? Now that wikipedia is in the top page, every poker spammer in the world is going to be trying to hijack that page. Are bloggers in general really this dumb ?
[rant off]
Google needs paid anti-ads. (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, so i can also see the scamentologists doing a few thousand of those on their detractors [xenu.net], but... it might still be worth it.
French bullDOG? (Score:5, Funny)
That does seem strange. If it was a French Bullfrog site instead, it would be quite understandable.
"I have developed some methods for controling it, but I do not want to divulge them publiclly since the bad guys would then know my counter measures"
Yeah, I know. Those French bulldog guys play hardball. They monitor all the Slashdot posts, too, so you are wise not to reveal your tricks. I know myself, that every time someone mods me down, it has to be one of those bulldog spammers.
"Click on http://www.parismastiff.com for your best Gallic bulldog deals!"
dealing with comment spam (Score:5, Informative)
Well, for everyone else, here are some strategies to combat comment spam. There should be plugins or upgrades available for whatever software you're using that add these features:
1) Add ref="nofollow" [slashdot.org] to all links posted. Google will then ignore this link when assigning pagerank. This is invisible to the user.
2) Force the browser to calculate a javascript hash [weblogsinc.com] everytime a comment is posted. This prevents automated spambots from posting comments. This is invisible to the user.
3) Filter for common words (viagra, poker) then manually approve those comments. This is a lot of work for you, but no work for your users.
4) Use captchas [wikipedia.org] - your users must type in the text in pictures when posting a comment. This is extremely intrusive for your users.
5) Approve every comment. Lots of work for you.
6) Disable comments. It's better than giving up your blog as, sadly, many people are choosing to do.
Simple solution to Googlebombing. (Score:5, Insightful)
I detailed this elsewhere. All Google has to do is add a filter to its results so that pages that do not actually contain the search word/phrases do NOT show up in result lists.
This used to be standard search-engine behaviour, and because of this, results used to be a lot more accurate (unless they were merely outdated, but even in this case, the results were accurate at one time!).
Re:I so do not get this. (Score:2)
I clicked the link in the first post, and got a picture of a very flexable man performing acts upon himself which were exactly unlike electronic card games.
Is there some kind of FAQ or something I can print out, form into a cup, and vomit into after seeing that image?
Re:I so do not get this. (Score:2)